Hard Times Again

Amid the wreck of capitalism and socialism, Dickens is timelier than ever.

We live in hard times, and all the indications are that they may get much, even very much, harder. No one, at any rate, would take a bet that they won’t.

The number of children in America claiming subsidized meals in school has shot up; the homeless are increasing by the hour; the formerly prosperous are laid off without so much as a thank you; the young struggle to find any work at all; beggars are making a comeback on the streets of cities as if they had been hiding all these years, waiting for the right moment to emerge from their subterranean lairs into the world above.

The February bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, then, could hardly come at a more appropriate moment in economic history, for Dickens was the revealer, the scourge, the prose poet, of urban destitution—a destitution that, in our waking nightmares, we fear may yet return.

Dickens knew whereof he wrote. It was his habit to walk miles through the streets of London, and no man—except perhaps Henry Mayhew—was more observant than he. Often accused by his detractors of exaggerating reality, he claimed in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit that he merely saw what others did not see, or chose not to see, and put it into plain words. What was caricature to some was to him no more than the unvarnished truth. He held up a mirror to his age.

The adjective “Dickensian” is more laden with connotation than the adjective that pertains to any other writer: Jamesian, for example, or Joycean, even Shakespearian. We think of workhouses, of shabby tenements with bedding of rags, of schools where sadistic and exploitative schoolmasters beat absurdities into the heads of hungry children, of heartless proponents of the cold charity, of crooked lawyers spinning out their cases in dusty, clerk-ridden chambers. We think of Oliver Twist asking for more, of Wackford Squeers exclaiming, “Here’s richness for you!”, as he tastes the thin slops his school doles out to his unfortunate pupils, of Mrs. Gamp looking at her patient and saying, “He’d make a lovely corpse!”

If he had been only a social commentator, though, Dickens would have been forgotten by all except specialist historians of his age. But he is not forgotten; he survives the notorious defects of his books—their sometimes grotesque sentimentality, their sprawling lack of construction, their frequent implausibility—to achieve whatever immortality literature can confer. Over and over again, in passage after passage, the sheer genius of his writing shines from the page and is the despair of all prose writers after him.

When Dickens called himself “the Inimitable,” he was speaking no more than the truth; he was the greatest comic writer in his, or perhaps in any other, language. And the comedy runs deep: it is not trivial, for while it depicts absurdity, pomposity, and even cruelty, it has the curious effect of reconciling us to life even as it lays human weaknesses out for our inspection.

Sairey Gamp, for example, the drunken, slatternly nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit, is as undesirable a creature as it is possible to be. Who would want to be nursed by her? She is, in effect, the exemplar of the need for the reform of an entire profession. Yet by a peculiar kind of alchemy Dickens makes us glad that there is a world in which a Mrs. Gamp can exist. A world without characters such as she would be the poorer for their absence.

When, gloriously, she says of the gin in the teapot, “Don’t ask me to take none, but put it on the chimbley piece, and let me put my lips to it when I feel so dispoged,” our hearts leap with an indefinable joy. The verbal genius of the simple replacement of the s in disposed by the g delights us. (Though no doubt Dickens would have told us that he actually had heard such a transposition rather than invented it, so that his genius was in noticing and remembering, not in inventing, which is a reproach to our own lack of observation.) The slattern’s ridiculous pretension to gentility and refinement, while maintaining her slovenliness, incites us to reflect upon our own pretensions—pretense being the permanent condition of mankind.

And while our love of Mrs. Gamp, tinged as it no doubt is by guilt that we can feel any affection for so disgraceful a being, does not prevent us from recognizing the obvious need for nursing to be placed on a more respectable footing, it also performs the function of restraining our wish for soulless perfection. A perfect world, or rather an attempted perfect world, in which there were no Dickensian characters would be a living hell.

I think this is what a student of English at the North Korean Foreign Languages Institute was driving at when he sidled up to me in Pyongyang and said, quickly and sotto voce (for unscripted communication with foreigners was dangerous for North Koreans), “Reading Shakespeare and Dickens is the greatest, the only, joy of my life.” I was, of course, in great admiration of the feat of his having learned English of such proficiency that he could appreciate the two authors while never having left his hermetic native hell and communicate his enthusiasm for them so elegantly. No doubt Dickens had been taught to him as a means of demonstrating the diabolical nature of capitalist society; but the lesson he had drawn from Dickens was quite otherwise, that Mrs. Gamp (for example), impoverished and degraded as she was, at least spoke in what was unmistakably her own voice and not that compelled by any political master. She was free as no North Korean was free.

• • •

As we live in hard times, it is worth considering Dickens’s novel of that title, especially as political economy is one of its most important themes. Has this book, published more than a century and a half ago, anything to say to us about our present predicament, beyond young Tom Gradgrind’s exclamation, “For God’s sake, don’t talk about bankers”?

Dickens is often reproached for his absence of firm and unequivocal moral, political, and philosophical outlook. He veers crazily between the ferociously reactionary and the mushily liberal. He lampoons the disinterested philanthropy of Mrs. Jellyby (in Bleak House) with the same gusto or ferocity as he excoriates the egotism of Mr. Veneering (in Our Mutual Friend). He suggests that businessmen are heartless swine (Bounderby in Hard Times) or disinterestedly charitable (the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby). He satirizes temperance (in The Pickwick Papers) as much as he derides drunkenness (in Martin Chuzzlewit). The evil Jew (in Oliver Twist) is matched by the saintly Jew (in Our Mutual Friend). As Stephen Blackpool, the working-class hero of Hard Times says, “it’s aw a muddle.”

George Orwell, in his famous essay on Dickens, saw in this philosophical and moral muddle not a weakness but a strength, a generosity of spirit, an openness to the irreducible complexity of mankind’s moral situation, an immunity to what he called “the smelly little orthodoxies that are now contending for our souls.” And indeed, the principal target of Hard Times is such an orthodoxy, namely a hard-nosed utilitarianism combined with an unbending liberalism. (Liberal in the economic, not cultural, sense.)

The principal bearers of the doctrine are Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby. Gradgrind is a teacher whose statement of pedagogical philosophy is surely one of the greatest opening passages of any novel ever written:

Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

By the end of the novel, Gradgrind has learned the insufficiency of facts for the conduct of human life, as he might have done merely by a little self-examination or reflection on the nature of moral and aesthetic judgment. It cannot be said that Gradgrind is a caricature, a character so exaggerated that he never did or could exist: passage after passage in Hard Times parallels almost exactly the account of John Stuart Mill’s education in his Autobiography, published 19 years after the novel. Furthermore, “the minds of reasoning animals” exactly captures the flavor of much recent scientistic writing about the human condition. Like hope in the human breast, scientism springs eternal in the human mind.

Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, the mill owner, claims to have come up in the world the hard way:

My mother left me to my grandmother, and, according to the best of my remembrance, my grandmother was the wickedest and the worst old woman that ever lived. If I got a little pair of shoes by any chance, she would take ’em off and sell ’em for drink… . She kept me in an egg-box. As soon as I was big enough to run away, of course I ran away. Then I became a young vagabond; and instead of one old woman knocking me about and starving me, everybody of all ages knocked me about and starved me.

This turns out to be quite untrue. In fact, his parents made sacrifices on his behalf, but the lie justifies his philosophy, that workers who ask for higher pay want turtle soup to be fed them from a golden spoon, that the slightest regulation of child labor will drive employers into bankruptcy and force them to abandon their factories, that the smoke belching from the mills not only cannot be reduced but is actually healthful for the lungs, that any form of collective action by the “hands” is the first stage of violent revolution, that any form of charity is the encouragement of idleness. In short: “What you couldn’t show to be purchasable in the cheapest market and salable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.”

Again, this is scarcely caricature. During the Irish famine, liberals like Charles Trevelyan—at the time to the left of the political spectrum—argued that to provide any form of relief to the starving was to encourage the very habits and practices, to say nothing of the overpopulation, that caused the famine in the first place. An abstract truth, as they believed it to be, overrode all considerations of humanity. True compassion consisted of letting events take their course.

One might have supposed, then, that Dickens would be much in favor of the unions; but in fact his depiction of the union leader, Slackbridge, in Hard Times is very unfavorable. He realized that demagogic leaders were perfectly capable of ensnaring good men en masse:

Slackbridge was not so honest, he was not so manly, he was not so good-humored [as his audience]; he substituted cunning for their simplicity, and passion for their safe solid sense… . Strange as it always is to consider any assembly in submissively resigning itself to the dreariness of any complacent person … it was even particularly affecting to see this crowd of honest faces, whose honesty in the main no competent observer free from bias could possibly doubt, agitated by such a leader.

Under the impact of today’s economic crisis, the shrillness of opposing camps, of diagnosers, prognosticators, and curers, has increased. Even the same financial page of the same newspaper may have articles proposing diametrically opposed solutions, the only thing in common between them being the certainty with which they are offered. Each has a single simple principle, Gradgrindian or not, that is the supposed key to happiness, prosperity, economic growth. But now more than ever it is necessary to suppress our inherent tendency to seek the key to all questions, and reading Dickens may help us to do it.

Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

14 Responses to Hard Times Again

In The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961, Fr Ian Ker identifies Charles Dickens (1906) both as Chesterton’s best work and as the key to understanding his Catholicism. “It is a typically Chestertonian paradox that while Dickens was nothing if not ignorant of and prejudiced against Catholicism as well as the Middle Ages, it is his unconsciously Catholic and Mediaeval ethos that is the heart of Chesterton’s critical study.”

First, Chesterton’s Dickens celebrated the ordinary, and rejoiced in sheer living and even sheer being. He was originally a “higher optimist” whose “joy is in inverse proportion to the grounds for so rejoicing,” because he simply “falls in love with” the universe, and “those love her with most intensity who love her with least cause.” Hence the exaggeration of Dickens’s caricatures, expressing both the heights of the highs and the depths of the lows in the life of one who looks at the world in this way.

For, secondly, Dickens created “holy fools”: Toots in Dombey and Son, Miss Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend, the Misses Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit, to name but a few. Dickens also “created a personal devil in every one of his books,” figures with the “atrocious hilarity” of gargoyles. In either case, since the everyday world is so utterly extraordinary and extraordinary things so much a part of the everyday, so the absurd is utterly real and the real is utterly absurd. Postmodern, or what? Read Dickens, then read Chesterton on Dickens, and then re-read Dickens: who needs wilful French obscurantism in the name of ‘irony’?

And thirdly, then, Dickens was the true successor of Merry England, unlike his “pallid” contemporaries, the Pre-Raphaelites and “Gothicists”, whose “subtlety and sadness” was in fact “the spirit of the present day” after all. It was Dickens who “had the things of Chaucer”: “the love of large jokes and long stories and brown ale and all the white roads of England”; “story within story, every man telling a tale”; and “something openly comic in men’s motley trades”.

Dickens’s defence of Christmas was therefore a fight “for the old European festival, Pagan and Christian”, i.e., for “that trinity of eating, drinking and praying that to moderns appears irreverent”, unused as the modern mind is to “the holy day which is really a holiday.” Dickens’s defence of Christmas was therefore a fight “for the old European festival, Pagan and Christian”, i.e., for “that trinity of eating, drinking and praying that to moderns appears irreverent”, unused as the modern mind is to “the holy day which is really a holiday.”

Fr Ker traces these themes in Orthodox and The Everlasting Man. The former presents Catholicism, in profoundly Dickensian terms, as “that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which Christendom has rightly termed romance”, which meets the need “so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome.” Yet so to view the world is precisely to realise “that there is something the matter”, which is why pagans have always been “conscious of the Fall if they were conscious of nothing else”, since (and this is obviously much more controversial) Original Sin “in the only part of Christian theology which can be proved,” so that “the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition”, but rather “the normal itself is an abnormality.” Once again, this is like Postmodernism, only older, wiser, better.

Better not least because, for Chesterton, it was this view of the world’s flawed goodness that made Dickens a social reformer, since he recognised people’s degraded dignity. One is made by Christianity “fond of this world, even in order to change it”, in contrast to simple (one might say, Whig or Marxist) optimism or simple pessimism (such as that of much of the political Right), each of which discourages reform. We have to “hate [the world] enough to want to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing”, for it is “at once an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.”

Such was the view of Dickens and of Chesterton; and such is the Christian view, uniquely, as all of Christianity’s critics unwittingly concede by simultaneously accusing it both of excessive optimism and of excessive pessimism. Chesterton presciently predicted that an age of unbelief would be an age of conservatism (in the worst sense), whereas for the orthodox “in the hearts of men, God has been put under the feet of Satan, so that there can always be a revolution; for a revolution is a restoration.” Furthermore, “A strict rule is not only necessary for ruling; it is also necessary for rebelling”, since “a fixed and familiar ideal is necessary to any sort of revolution.”

Interesting, reading Dickens I was never overwhelmed by his descriptions of poverty. Poverty is a fact of life, and will always be so. What I could not help but noticing was how vile the “job creators” were when the government allowed them to practice laissez-faire economics. Children were working for pennies, and workplace injuries were commonplace. Injured workers were tossed aside to figure out how to survive in their new condition, as there were always new workers waiting to take their place. It was an abusive system that could only be brought into check with government regulations. Many are calling for removing the “onerous regulations” these days, but I think we need more regulations, tougher ones. After all, no one was charged with a crime over the financial collapse that has inflicted far more misery than any shoplifter ever has. We need more regulations, and lots of them. We have to remove all the loopholes that allow people like Romney to get away with paying under 15%. I pray that Romney is the Republican choice, because it will be near impossible for him to argue that taxes are too high for the rich.

Also Lao Tzi is good. The point is resisting temptations to become self-righteously opinionated through any pretense of “being more observant than mere mortals” (as demanded by Dickensian egotism and by positivists everywhere). Just be (as Dickensian characters “are”).

Dickens’ novels are secular in that they portray poverty and human degradation as arising universally from the actions of mankind. Pure inexplicable evil does not play a part, which makes the world of Dickens rather more comfortable for me.
And his emphasis on human dignity and virtue at all levels, as being primarily kindness and tolerance, is uplifting.
But his novels also present the philosophical point that human dignity cannot be prescribed and measured by economic or political nostrums: the French revolution, for example, produces terror and inhuman behavior even worse than the overthrown tyranny, which can be met only by individual human courage and sacrifice. That is what makes him a great novelist rather than a mere polemicist.

Even though one may not agree with everything that Dr.Dalrymple says, one thing is certain, his articles seldom fail to make one think and ponder deeply about the profound issues which endure so long as humankind exists: politics, moral & social behavior and so forth. He is, in my humble opinion, the Orwell of our time, and if there is a George Orwell Pursuit of the Truth Award, he surely, ought to be its first recipient.

Dalrymples “The Real Poverty” essay is the best. It may be called something else but he explains poverty very well. I should know: Iam poor, was born in worse conditions than I care to remember and very well may be poor when I die yet my spirit is rich. I do not drag my knuckles nor do I breathe thru my mouth. I have a degree and can explain European history with the adroitness of an actual paid historian, I speak well and even dress above my means but Dickens knew my lot .

Can Chesterton have been accurate when he speaks of Dickens’ anti-catholicism? He excoriates the Gordon rioters and anti-catholic bigots in Barnaby Rudge. The Catholic characters are seen in a benign light in this novel.

Dickens survives because his basic message is simple and eternal: Be good to each other, and use some common sense.

Yes, Dickens was a social crusader, but he wasn’t one who believed that simply passing this or that law was going to do the job of making the world a better place. If he had believed that, and if his novels reflected that, then, as Dalrymple notes, his novels would today be historical curiosities on the level of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Some would not even have had any relevance in his own time – by the time Bleak House was published in 1853, the Chancery court system it excoriated had been largely reformed. And yet the experience of dealing with an uncaring bureaucracy that consistently denies justice to the people is a pretty universal one; one that we can certainly still relate to 150 years later. And what is Oliver Twist other than the story of a boy without parents who slips through the cracks of an badly-run and fundamentally uncaring social welfare system, ends up homeless, and spends the rest of the novel trying to keep out of the clutches of a gang? Change a few details and it could just as easily take place in modern-day Chicago or Los Angeles. Notice too that Oliver is not saved by that system, but by the kindness and charity of individuals – another thing that is just as relevant today as when it was written.

As long as selfishness, meanness, and stupidity are part of the human condition, which is to say, forever (sorry Gene Roddenberry), and as long as kindness, mercy, and common sense are things that people can be moved to employ, Dickens will remain relevant.